3 Kings

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  As hip-hop’s first great institutions rose in New York, the West Coast scene was still disentangling itself from disco. That didn’t stop the nascent genre’s teenage prince from giving himself a moniker reminiscent of his Bronx forerunners: “Dr. Dre, the Master of Mixology.” The stage name, which he quickly shortened, was a portmanteau of his given name and the nickname of his favorite basketball player, the soaring dunkmaster Julius “Dr. J” Erving. After cashing in on a steady fifty-dollar-per-night DJ gig at Eve After Dark, Dre did some flying of his own—in an orange Mazda RX-3 coupe purchased secondhand for $3,500 from his boss, Alonzo Williams.27

  The World Class Wreckin’ Cru kept cashing in at Los Angeles–area nightclubs, and Dre’s renown grew as a DJ,28 but his ability to lug around sound equipment—and the moneymaking opportunities that went along with it—was limited by the size of his car. He didn’t make it easy for friends to lend him a larger vehicle either. “I would never give Dre my van,” says Williams. “Dre would stop and have sex with somebody. He never would make it to the gig.”29

  But Williams put up with the young producer’s antics because of his considerable talent. Thanks in part to Dre’s beats, Williams landed a $100,000 deal for the Cru with CBS’s Epic Records. He spent about $13,000 on the first album, Rapped in Romance, and gave each of the group’s other members $15,000. The Cru drew on influences coming out of New York: Bambaataa, Run-D.M.C., and Flash, to name a few.

  But the record never took off, and Williams soon grew tired of Dre’s immaturity. The producer racked up moving violations; he’d leave them unpaid and ignore each summons he received. When he didn’t show up in court, the summonses turned into warrants, and Williams had to bail him out of jail repeatedly. The first two times, he had an incentive: the Cru had a show to play, and then studio time booked. When it happened again, the group’s schedule was clear, so Williams decided to teach Dre a lesson. Fortunately for Dre, his acquaintance Eric “Eazy-E” Wright, a small-time drug dealer of similarly tiny physical stature, offered to bail him out if he’d make some beats for Eazy’s new label.

  Eazy had founded Ruthless Records with help from veteran manager Jerry Heller, who’d met Eazy through Williams, another one of his clients. Many rappers (Jay-Z included) would later use drug-dealing profits to start a record company; in an era when many major labels were still squeamish about hard-edged hip-hop, that was often the only way to put their music on wax. At first, Dre’s involvement with Eazy only involved producing records to pay back his bail debt, and he remained part of the Cru. Then, one night at Eve After Dark, he saw Run-D.M.C. perform. “That was just it for me,” Dre later said.30

  Dre’s contract with the Cru expired in 1986, the same year Ice-T released “6 in the Mornin’,” considered by many to be the first example of West Coast gangsta rap (Philadelphia lyricist Schoolly D gets pioneering credit on the East Coast). For Dre, the notion of donning sequined jumpsuits to perform with the Cru no longer seemed tenable. One day, he simply stopped showing up at rehearsals. Along with fellow group member Antoine “DJ Yella” Carraby, he teamed up with Eazy and teenage rapper O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson (as well as, briefly, the performer Kim “Arabian Prince” Nazel and, later, the rapper Lorenzo “MC Ren” Patterson) to form a group of their own: N.W.A. (Niggaz with Attitudes).31

  Their first production together was Eazy’s “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” a song with a protagonist who wakes up at noon, immediately gets drunk, and encounters the stereotypical hallmarks of the era’s Los Angeles urban experience: guns, drugs, domestic violence. As depicted in the blockbuster biopic Straight Outta Compton, Ice Cube wrote the lyrics and Dr. Dre provided the beat, coaching the novice rapper Eazy as he recorded verses line by line over a period of days. The latter went to Macola, a local distributor run by Canadian former tugboat captain Don Macmillan, and had the recording pressed up as a single under Ruthless.

  Eazy named himself sole proprietor of Ruthless, with Heller serving as general manager and taking 20 percent of every incoming dollar. Though Eazy offered him a fifty-fifty ownership split, Heller says he proposed the general manager agreement because he “wanted to bend over backward to do what was right.” (The setup also left Heller better off in the event of an asset seizure by the authorities, a not-insignificant backstop given Eazy’s past.)32

  Heller found Dre particularly impressive. The producer spoke softly and sparsely, parceling out directives of just a few words at a time, but would sometimes spend eight hours polishing a single line with an artist.33 Heller helped N.W.A. land a distribution deal with Priority Records, and the other group members eagerly signed the contracts placed in front of them. But their financial savvy lagged behind their musical chops. As Dre put it, “We were just a bunch of creative guys who got together and did something amazing but were clueless about business.”34

  There was soon quite a bit more business to know about. In 1988, N.W.A. launched its debut studio album, Straight Outta Compton, which eventually climbed to number thirty-seven on the Billboard charts and sold more than three million copies, despite virtually no initial airplay. More impressive than its sales total was the album’s polarizing impact on American culture. Many mainstream outlets lauded its honesty: Newsweek dubbed it “some of the most grotesquely exciting music ever made.”35

  Dre himself soon scoffed at the effort, which in hindsight he viewed as crude. “To this day, I can’t stand that album,” he said in 1993. “I threw that thing together in six weeks so we could have something to sell out of the trunk.”36 Yet even traditionally white-rock-focused publications like Rolling Stone have since ranked Straight Outta Compton among the best albums of all time. That’s no accident: while making the record, Dre would sometimes pull aside one Caucasian member of the Ruthless staff and ask, “You think white kids would like this?”37 The fact that they did was what made N.W.A. so dangerous for many observers. As Ice-T said on Oprah Winfrey’s show in 1990, “If only my friends were hearing these records, nobody’d care. [But] the white kids from suburbia are listening to N.W.A., and the parents don’t know what to do about it.”

  Though the members of N.W.A. were essentially nihilist moneymakers who never intended to be political—“Fuck that black power shit,” Eazy once said. “We don’t give a fuck”38—the record touched off a political earthquake whose aftershocks made it all the way to Washington, DC. Officials started to take wary notice of hip-hop, and they didn’t like what they saw, particularly the song “Fuck tha Police.” It didn’t matter that the track had been recorded by a group of kids fresh out of high school with a rap sheet by that point mostly limited to traffic violations, or that it represented the unrestrained outcry of a voiceless community against racial profiling and downright brutality. Nor did it seem to matter that the local authorities often issued similarly violent missives: at around the same time, Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates told a Senate hearing that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot.”39

  As N.W.A. embarked upon its first major tour, government forces began to hound the group. FBI assistant director Milt Ahlerich sent a letter to Priority Records in August 1989, saying that “recordings such as the one from N.W.A. are both discouraging and degrading to these brave, dedicated officers.” Then he added, somewhat ominously, “Music plays a significant role in society, and I wanted you to be aware of the FBI’s position relative to this song and its message.”40

  Under pressure from law enforcement, N.W.A. initially agreed to refrain from playing “Fuck tha Police” at a September show in Detroit—but then launched into a rendition anyway. Officers stormed the stage and escorted the group back to its hotel; one officer reportedly said, “We just wanted to show the kids that you can’t say ‘Fuck the police’ in Detroit.”41 Members of the group were detained at their hotel, but no arrests were made; the FBI never took any action against the group, and the drama turned out to be something of a gift to N.W.A.42 “I have to say thanks to that FBI agent that wrote us that letter,” Dre said on VH1’s Beh
ind the Music. “You did a big service to us and… you made us a lot of money.”

  Indeed, the group’s tour grossed $650,000 in a single year. But $130,000 of that went to Heller, while Ice Cube took home just $23,000, plus another $32,000 for writing or cowriting half of the group’s songs. Cube seethed: he was living at home and driving a Suzuki Sidekick as Heller cruised L.A. in a Mercedes. So the rapper retained a lawyer who examined the case and said that Ruthless owed Cube at least $120,000. The two sides couldn’t come to an agreement, and the rapper eventually ditched N.W.A. in protest. Heller, who declined to comment for this book and passed away before it was finished, blamed the departure on what he described as Cube’s jealousy of Eazy. For his part, the latter didn’t seem fazed by losing his chief songwriter, simply saying, “It means we get more money.”43

  But just about everybody else in N.W.A.’s orbit knew that Ice Cube functioned as its lyrical spark plug and Dre its sonic pistons. Heller provided the industry experience and Eazy brought capital, both of which Dre was beginning to amass on his own. And yet Heller and Eazy received the largest checks from Ruthless. Dre soon realized that he wasn’t in a terrific situation—and that he might be better off starting his own company. Of course, he was still contractually obligated to Ruthless.

  “I know Dre,” says Williams. “If he thinks he’s being taken advantage of, he’ll walk. He has no problem. If he don’t like a situation… he’ll find a way out.”44

  In 1986, Run-D.M.C. released its third album, Raising Hell, which earned triple-platinum certification and peaked at number six on Billboard’s mainstream album charts. With Aerosmith’s help on its cover of the rock giant’s “Walk This Way,” the Queens group had made perhaps the most compelling case of any hip-hop act so far that the genre was more than a fad.

  The buzz carried over to the group’s show at Madison Square Garden later that year. After Jam Master Jay and D.M.C. walked out to a standing ovation, D.M.C. gazed out at the crowd imperiously. “Run is backstage, and he said he’s not coming out tonight,” he told the audience. “Until you make some motherfucking noise.” The crowd started chanting Run’s name. When he finally appeared, he opened the show with a line that exemplified hip-hop’s unapologetic swagger: “This is my motherfucking Garden.”45

  Having suspected that the group would elicit such a response, Russell Simmons had invited a team of executives from German shoemaker Adidas to the show and prepared a surprise. Before Run-D.M.C. played its song “My Adidas,” an ode to shell-toed shoes, the rappers asked everyone to take off their kicks and hoist them in the air. Thousands of pairs of Adidas floated toward the rafters. Thanks to such displays, Simmons brokered an endorsement deal with Adidas for Run-D.M.C. worth $1 million.46 At the time, he says, “it was easier to sell Adidas by loving them than by making your own.”47

  Hip-hop’s first seven-figure branding pact served as a precursor to the even bigger bonanzas that came as the corporate world grew more comfortable with the genre. Many of those deals originated with Simmons, as both a manager and label founder. Starting in the 1980s, he discovered and developed some of hip-hop’s brightest behind-the-scenes players. He launched Def Jam with a hard-rocking NYU student named Rick Rubin, now one of music’s most respected producers. (“I just realized he was the talented one,” says Simmons. “I chose to stay with him.”)48 With the help of lieutenants like Lyor Cohen, a six foot five dynamo of Israeli descent who started as Run-D.M.C.’s road manager, and Harlem-born general manager Andre Harrell, Def Jam went on to add iconic acts like James “LL Cool J” Smith,49 the Beastie Boys, and Public Enemy.

  If the early days of hip-hop were the Wild West, Def Jam operated as the freewheeling frontier capital. MC Serch, whose group 3rd Bass signed for a paltry $5,000 per member, recalls hanging out in the fledgling company’s early offices and answering fan mail for Slayer, the thrash metal band brought in by Rubin. “I would call fans and pretend like I was [frontman] Tom Araya,” he says, chuckling. “[Def Jam] was this machine… There was a great energy.”50

  As it amassed an increasingly diverse and powerful roster, Def Jam became a force in the world of radio, where one of the only reliable ways to get a hip-hop record played was through the rampant practice of payola, or bribing influential jocks to play a song. Tom Silverman estimates that some DJs were making $50,000 per year on the side.51 “I think that’s probably an understatement,” says Serch. “I knew guys in tertiary markets [who] worked less than twenty hours a week [and] had million-dollar condos.”52

  Meanwhile, another promotional medium was providing an alternative to radio: television, in the form of recently desegregated MTV. The channel almost exclusively played videos by white rock and pop acts from its founding in 1981 until 1984, when Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” broke through with a little help from Walter Yetnikoff, the head of CBS Records. He called MTV chief Bob Pittman and threatened to hold back future videos from all his artists, including Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, if Pittman didn’t play Jackson’s. MTV conceded and started playing rap videos, too.53

  Soon songs like 1986’s “Walk This Way” and LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad,” from 1987, amped up the demand for hip-hop videos so much that MTV completed its 180-degree turn, tapping Fab to host a new show called Yo! MTV Raps in 1988. The two-hour program featured a mix of music videos and interviews with rap stars from Salt-N-Pepa to N.W.A. (When the latter group appeared on the show to promote its second album, Dr. Dre told Fab he wanted to become a billionaire: “We out to take Donald Trump out!”)54

  The following year, when the Grammys created the first award for rap—but chose not to air its presentation—Fab hosted a boycott party on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and filmed an episode of Yo! MTV Raps with Ice-T and New York rapper Slick Rick, who’d been nominated alongside DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (now better known as Will Smith). It turned out to be one of the year’s best-attended parties, drawing visitors as unlikely as Forbes magazine chief Malcolm Forbes, who rolled in on a motorcycle.

  “So, Malcolm, how do you feel about rap?” asked Fab.

  “I’m ready to rock!” he said.

  To this day, Fab remains amazed.

  “We were in the heart of the zeitgeist,” says Fab. “Malcolm Forbes confirmed my show, Yo! MTV Raps—and hip-hop culture—had truly arrived.”55

  Diddy was similarly ready to rock. Intrigued by the idea of becoming both a performer and an entrepreneur, he applied to college and was accepted at Howard University, the historically black college based in Washington, DC. He spent the summer before his freshman year working as rapper-beatboxer Doug E. Fresh’s personal valet, shuttling Fresh’s clothes to and from the dry cleaner in his Volkswagen Rabbit convertible.56

  At Howard, Diddy majored in business but found that he preferred extracurriculars: namely, promoting parties in Washington, DC, and going back home to do the same on weekends and school breaks. Diddy inserted himself into New York’s hip-hop scene, popping up in one of Fresh’s videos as a backup dancer and ingratiating himself with influential figures at his events. “Everybody’s starting from the bottom,” Diddy once told me. “I think that people believed in me because… I had a certain swagger.”57

  His combination of confidence and eagerness helped him land an internship at Uptown Records. Andre Harrell had left Def Jam to found the label in 1986, and Diddy got himself an introduction from the late rapper Dwight “Heavy D” Myers, an acquaintance from Mount Vernon. Diddy made an early impression: one day, Harrell asked Diddy to gas up his car—and when the intern returned, he’d also washed and vacuumed it.58 Soon Diddy was getting up at dawn every Thursday to take the train from DC to New York, where he’d work two full days for Harrell before returning to Howard, often spending much of the ride in the Amtrak bathroom to avoid having to buy a ticket.

  In 1989, Harrell hired party promoter Jessica Rosenblum to throw a platinum-album celebration for Heavy D. “I have a new intern and he’s going to call you,” Harrell told her. “He’l
l run errands for you or help you if you need anything.” When the youngster phoned, Rosenblum was confused. “I literally couldn’t understand what the guy was saying,” she recalls. “So in my mind, I had had a phone call with ‘Tuffy,’ who was Andre’s new intern.”59

  She soon came to know Puffy quite well, and when they weren’t working, she obliged his requests to take him to all the “freaky” nightspots on the Lower East Side.60 Rosenblum introduced Diddy to her friends on the scene, and he soaked up their knowledge and style. “I always remember with Puffy, he wore sunglasses that I thought were tacky, and I’m like, ‘You gotta get your sunglass game up,’” says Rosenblum. “All I know is he owns dope sunglasses now.”61

  While still at Howard, Diddy heard that Uptown Records’ head of artists and repertoire (A&R)—the label’s chief talent scout—had left the company. Harrell had publicly stated that, with Uptown, he wanted to create a label with “that Harlem kind of cool hustler cachet to it.” Diddy knew he had what Harrell wanted, through both his lineage and his can’t-stop-won’t-stop attitude, and he took his boss to lunch to ask for the job. It wasn’t long before he dropped out of Howard and moved back to New York to work at Uptown full-time.62

  “Sometimes people become successful and famous because one thing leads to another and they blow up,” says Rosenblum. “But there are other people who are like, no matter what, they’re going to end up [on top]. And to me, he was one of those people.”63

  Clang!

  “I’m going to really talk to them about figuring out a way to secure that so it doesn’t just make such abrupt noise,” says Fab, after his latest thought gets interrupted by another pedestrian stomping on the metal trapdoor to his studio. “I was in here last night working, and it felt like somebody is going to just end up falling in this motherfucker.”64